Science and technology

SXSW blog, day three

A conference with social problems

SXSW Interactive is obsessed with social media—which is to say, with things that make it easier for people to find other people with similar interests. Some of these services, like Twitter and Facebook, are hugly popular, but others are so niche that at times it feels as if the entire conference is a self-referential joke, existing only to find technological solutions to its own social problems.

These problems are legion. How do you decide which panels and talks to go to, when there are as many as 40 or 50 happening at the same time? How do you arrange to meet up with your friends? Make new friends? Decide whether they're worth making friends with before you meet them? How do you tell everyone about the really cool thing you just saw? How do you tell just a few? How do you tell everyone the speaker you're listening to sucks, without the speaker finding out? How do you get people to come to your talk instead of the one by that guy just down the hallway whose talk seems really similar to yours but is honestly, like, totally lame?

I've already mentioned GroupMe, the group text-messaging service. Last night I and a group of friends—some old, some new and some of whom I'd never actually met—used it to keep up a running stream of actionable intelligence about waiting times, fun levels and the quality of the public at half a dozen parties across which we were scattered. I managed to avoid spending half an hour in a line, saved someone else an hour or more in another line, and learned before going into one particularly loud event that it was absolutely vital to procure earplugs.

Several apps vie to help you choose which sessions to attend. Lanyrd shows you all the sessions that people you're linked to on Twitter have shown an interest in. Sched does something similar, but ties in your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts too. SXSW's own social-networking app, designed to connect you with other attendees, doesn't have scheduling, but promises that it's on the way.

None of these apps is perfect. You can build a personal schedule on SXSW's own app-based conference programme, but nobody else can see it; ideally an outside app like Sched or Lanyrd would be able to access it, so you only have to fill out your choices once. But compared with just a couple of years ago, when the main tool for such real-time intelligence was a chaotic flood of tweets, it's a huge leap forward. It feels as if we cannot be far away from a critical convergence of these services that suddenly makes the traditional browsing of a conference programme almost entirely unnecessary.

Slightly surprisingly, given the number of people who pitch up in Austin at the last minute without a place to stay, there is no hotel-room-sharing app. Various people I've met used Airbnb to book accommodation in a private home, but there's surely a business opportunity in enabling people to find hotel rooms that someone no longer needs or to offer a spare bed in their own room in return for splitting the cost.

It's also surprisingly hard to find, among this thousands-strong hive mind, other people who are interested in the things that you are. Old-fashioned, physical, flesh-and-blood serendipity is still the best way to find useful conversations, and as one geek friend said dismissively, "serendipity doesn't scale". One could imagine an app on which people profile themselves using a pre-defined list of tags, and you search for people by tag. The problem, my friend points out, is that quite aside from the difficulty of creating and maintaining a sensible, agreed-on taxonomy of tags, people are actually uncommonly bad at describing themselves; you could fail to mention aspects of yourself that you pay no attention to, but that for someone else are precisely what makes you interesting.

At any rate, the easiest way for human beings to get information is not to scan a long list of facts or data but simply to ask other people. Localmind pinpoints your location and lets you broadcast questions to people nearby; anyone else logged in to the app can answer them. (The more answers you give, the more points you get; I'll write something later on such "gameification", a possibly mis-named concept.) Right now people near me are asking where to get free food or coffee, how long the line for the keynote speech is, and whether it's worth hanging out in various sponsored lounges. I just told someone where to find a good salad. I can feel my cosmic karma increasing already.